President Joe Biden plans to visit with Georgia voters on Saturday ahead of his commencement speech at Morehouse College on Sunday, before heading to Detroit to meet small-business owners later that afternoon, according to a new memo shared with NBC News by the Biden-Harris campaign. He will also deliver an NAACP speech that night. Neither of the additional stops on these trips have previously been made public.
The purpose of the trips, according to the campaign, is to meet Black voters where they are.
“This campaign will not take a single voter for granted,” Trey Baker, a senior campaign adviser, wrote in the memo. “We are not, and will not, parachute into these communities at the last minute, expecting their vote.”
The Biden campaign declined to provide more specifics about the president’s meetings with voters and small-business owners in the two states.
Earlier this week, Biden met family members of the plaintiffs in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled racial segregation in American public schools to be unconstitutional. And Friday Biden is scheduled to speak at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington alongside Vice President Kamala Harris before meeting with leaders of the Divine Nine, a group of historically Black sororities and fraternities.
The outreach comes as Biden looks to secure a voter base that historically has supported Democrats by an overwhelming margin but that has shown some softening in support in recent polling. The latest NBC News poll shows that Biden has support from about 58% of Black voters aged 18 to 49, and 88% of older Black voters. In the 2020 election, 87% of Black voters supported Biden for president, according to NBC News exit polling data.
Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has garnered about 25% support of the young Black voters ahead of this year’s election and 6% of older Black voters, according to the NBC News poll, in an election in which even minor changes in voting patterns in battleground states could decide the race. Dating back to 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has received more than 13% of the Black vote.
The memo says that Biden’s visits this weekend illustrate a commitment to Black Americans, with the campaign also visiting cultural spaces like Dreamville Fest in North Carolina, Black unemployment hitting record lows and the administration making efforts to forgive nearly $160 billion in student loans, which the campaign says, disproportionately affects Black Americans.
It also comes as Biden is facing a growing number of questions over his handling of the war in Gaza, which has sparked concerns at Morehouse and among Democrats more broadly. Many critics have become increasingly frustrated by the administration’s unwillingness to call for a permanent and immediate cease-fire in Gaza as officials there say the death toll has surpassed 35,000.
“Every day, from now until Election Day,” Baker wrote, “we will continue working diligently to ensure that come November, Black voters send Joe Biden and Kamala Harris back to the White House to continue delivering for Black America in unprecedented ways.”
For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
